Cannes Do: Narayan Devanathan's diary entry #3

Dentsu India's group executive and strategy officer writes an insightful piece on days 4 and 5 at the Cannes Lions festivalETBrandEquity | Updated: June 24, 2016, 10:38 IST

Day 4 started for me with a 9km run along the Croisette past the Palm Beach Casino and round the corner to Palm Beach itself, away from the slowly waking, partying Lions attendees on the other side. And when I polished off a lip-smacking tiramisu-flavored ice cream in a waffle cone and made it serve as my breakfast and still managed to make it in time for the first earmarked session of the day, I figured I could really get used to this kind of life. Alas, I highly doubt my company is going to open an office in Cannes, much less send me out to it even if it did.

That said, I figured I’d make the most of the here and now.

I’d originally lined up to see and hear Anderson Cooper in conversation with Anthony Bourdain (he who had recently treated Barack Obama to $6 noodles in a roadside café in Hanoi). But their combined popularity was such that the Lumiere Theatre, the largest auditorium in the Palais, ran out of room for a large section of the crowd (including me) lined up on the stairs outside its entrance.

I ended up instead in a fairly interesting session titled Creativity on the Stump, about communications and branding on the U.S. presidential election campaign trail. A former speechwriter and campaign manager for Bill Clinton, the digital campaign manager for Obama in ’08 and ’12, and the founder and editor of Politico magazine were the intellectual heavyweights discussing this topic. Several lessons from the political communications sphere stood out as valuable and applicable for me to transpose into the world of commercial marketing and branding.

Data and digital, for example, were primarily tools of fundraising in the two Obama campaigns. This time around though, for one of the candidates at least, digital has been the primary -- and for the most part, free -- tool for brand creation and sustenance. It’s not just that The Donald has been the most adept in matching the inherent snark of the Twittersphere and use it to his advantage. But, as Don Baer of Politico pointed out, he was unabashedly defining and putting out his values for the world to see. That a part of the world is disgusted by those values is a different matter. But just as Bernie Sanders used an anthemic paid television commercial to showcase his all-American-ness and warmth, and Hilary Clinton commandeered the power of $160 million dollars to strut her stuff, Trump showcased his disgust with the status quo, with the parochialisim and partisanship of Beltway Politics. Those were his values. (His apparent racism and sexism, and whining and bullying, were merely his tone of voice, as we call it in advertising.) And as Anna Wintour and Will Smith had reinforced a day earlier, Trump was making his intentions ambitiously clear, and visibly personal. This was his authentic self, there was no mask.

There is another theme that I will dwell on in more detail in another column, but a talk titled Where We Are All Heading by Wired’s Kevin Kelly reinforced to me the varying shades of ignorance (or knowledge, depending on how you look at it) in the industry. Allow me to make an example of myself here. In the hallucinatory world that I live in, I believe myself to be fairly well-read and up to date on a variety of topics from around the world. I was therefore suitably excited to hear and see Kelly’s pronouncements about the future in ways and words that were new to me.

But a colleague of mine from Dentsu Tokyo came away clearly unimpressed.

“I could have spoken about the things he spoke about,” he said. “I mean, this is Kevin Kelly from Wired, not just some random person. Maybe he’s getting old.”

What got me excited was this. Most simply, he contrasted the old Industrial Revolution as being about the creation of artificial power in multiples of human or animal power, versus the current ongoing Industrial Revolution as being about the creation of artificial intelligence in multiples of human intelligence. In other words, IR-I was about X + AP where IR-II is about X+AI.

I’m going to oversimplify the following to make a point here. The European worldview on IR-I was: “Machines to do the work faster? Oh good, humans can work less now.” (This is most evident on the French Riviera, by the way.) In contrast, the American worldview on IR-I was: “Machines do the work faster? Oh good, humans can work more now.” The sensible view to adopt with regard to IR-II would be the former. Then again, the world is not exactly a stellar showcase of adopting sensible viewpoints right now (or always in history, for that matter). But if we did do that, we wouldn’t need to fear the machines taking over the world. As Kelly said, productivity is for robots. The inaccurate fields—like science that is predicated on failure for making progress, like the arts, like innovation, like experiences—need intelligence. And given we’re still just at the “beginning of the beginning of the beginning,” the impossible is merely a matter of looking beyond the beginning to the beginning of the beginning.

If Kevin Kelly exemplified the naïve excitement of the scientific temperament, then multiple Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone calmly but passionately showcased how practically every field of human endeavor was going to collide, sometimes violently, with global geopolitics. Given the everyday additions to the list of issues that concern us all in an interconnected world, the world of brands is not immune to it either. And if there’s one thing we all in this world can learn from Stone, it is this: use real drama to make people agitated enough to reassess and rethink their world. Then again, maybe our industry needs to agitate itself first.

The start to Day 5 with the always-well-curated Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors’ Showreel seemed to indicate that the instigators of agitation were close at hand, if we paid attention to them. While the headline grabber may have been a film entirely conceived, planned, directed and produced by a machine, dark themes dominated the Showreel, aimed at jolting the audience out of their comfort zones. And as much as new technique and technology were showcased, the push towards new thinking was also very much visible.

Two themes, one continuing throughout the Festival and one for all times, stood out in the rest of the day.

David Droga’s interaction with Kevin Plank, the founder and CEO of the current darling of the sports brand world Under Armour was all about keeping it real and the lessons from not keeping it real. Droga’s point about authenticity being a daily goal, much like love, was practical advice in a time when it can be mistakenly relegated to a vision / mission statement on a slide somewhere. What, for example, could possibly lead Droga5 to resign a globally exciting and lucrative account such as Puma after creating some category-reshaping work with After Hours Athletes, for the potential (not certain) opportunity to work with a relatively tiny challenger like Under Armour? It went back to Droga5’s authentic belief in constantly wanting to do something new and exciting. And they’ve done it too many times now to make it seem like a hollow claim.

One minor quibble with this session and the next, featuring the director of The Revenant, Alejandro Iñárritu: the quality of the moderators, or rather, their moderation. Tham Kai Meng, the global CCO of Ogilvy in particular seemed to be having an off-day. Where, in his elements, I imagine he could have made the session far more pulsating and exciting a conversation, on the day he merely turned it into a Q&A, reading out pre-prepared questions from a sheet of paper.

Nevertheless, Iñárritu’s inherent brilliance shone through. There were two specific nuggets, timeless advice for our industry that we would do well to bring out again and polish to a shiny brilliance.

One is that progress is sometimes about going back to the beginning. As an example, there’s a lot of excitement currently about the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in film-making, but VR is based on the same principle that cinema began with: creating and enhancing never-before sensorial experiences.

The second is that our job is to make the illusive and elusive seem real, without fully revealing how we do it. That’s where we will continue to have the opportunity to create magic for the people we want to engage with. That’s where we will continue to fall in love with advertising again and again.